Georgian is the most difficult language I’ve ever seriously studied. Phonetically it’s probably the most difficult full stop. But I continue to plod away at it and bought this Bible to help me. I wanted to encounter Georgian in the wild, as it were. Not that this is truly wild Georgian: it’s a translation, not something composed by a native speaker from scratch. But Bibles are usually strong influences on the language of a Christian nation and the Georgian Bible, like Georgian Christianity, is among the oldest in the world.

This is modern Georgian, though. Or fairly modern: I can notice some archaic plurals and I’ve been told that there are old-fashioned verbs. If my Georgian were better, I would notice more of what’s archaic, but I don’t think it’s as far from modern Georgian as the King James Version is from modern English. I’d been having even more difficulty with it if that were the case, I suspect. I would have preferred just a New Testament, because it would have been smaller and less intimidating, but perhaps one day I’ll be able to dip anywhere into this full Bible and understand what I’m reading.

At the moment, I can’t do that. I still find Georgian verbs very difficult, but that’s one of the good things about the Gospels. They’re repetitive and use a limited vocabulary. And I’m already familiar with the stories. Even so, I have to prime myself by reading each section in another language before I try the Georgian. Not English: that would be too simple and no good as linguistic exercise. Instead, I use the Latin of a Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, with occasional glances at the Greek that flanks it.

Latin is easy next to Georgian and although I can’t read Tacitus or Cicero in the original, the Latin of the Gospels is very straightforward. But I still need to think harder than in English, which makes the meaning grow more slowly and powerfully in my brain. I didn’t appreciate the Gospels properly until I read them in Latin and Greek. There are some strange things going on and the Last Supper and Crucifixion are moving stories.

But I’m not moved or awed in Georgian: I’m still reading too slowly and understanding too weakly. The stepping-stones in Latin are close together and dry underfoot. I can walk across quickly and confidently, enjoying the sound and sight of the river:

And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly. (Matthew 26:75)

One word is almost identical in all three languages: “me”. And the Georgian genitive of Iesos uses a suffix much like the one in English. The suffix Georgian uses on nouns in the past tense – ეს თორმეტი იესომ დაარიგა, Es tormet’i Iesom daarigi, “These twelve Jesus sent forth” (Mth 10:5) – is strange to speakers of English, French or German, but it’s like the -ne used not so far off in Hindi. Georgian isn’t an Indo-European language and has resisted the influence of its giant neighbour Russian with surprising success, but it’s not as alien as Chinese or Arabic.

Except in its phonology and phonetics. That’s part of what attracts me to it: as I said in an earlier review, Georgian torments the tongue even as it pleases the eye. The alphabet is one of the most beautiful ever created. I was disappointed at first by the font used in this book, but I’ve got used to it now. It’s minimal, distinguishing ხ and ძ, შ and წ only by orientation, and perhaps that suits the simplicity of the Gospels better.

But I would prefer a more decorative font for იოანე ღმერთისმეტყველის გამოცხადება, Ioane Ghmertismet’qvelis Gamotskhadeba, or the John Prophet’s Revelation. I’m not ready for that final book of the New Testament yet, because I’ve not even reached the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the first book of the New Testament. But I hope to be ready one day. I might even be able to read parts of it without a Latin crib. That’s where the მეძავთა და დედამიწის სიბილწეთა დედა is waiting: the medzavta da dedamits’is sibilts’eta deda, the “whores’ and earth’s abominations’ mother”, is waiting. Revelation in Georgian will be even stranger than it is in Greek, Latin and English.

My German is weak, my Georgian is weaker, so I decided to improve both by getting this German-Georgian dictionary and using it with a German-English dictionary. My plan is working, but the dictionary wasn’t as comprehensive as I hoped. For example, if you look up Gott in the Deutsch-Georgisch section, you get ღმერთი ghmerti, but you aren’t told that the irregular genitive is ღვთის ghvtis. Nor does that appear in the Georgisch-Deutsch section under ღმერთი ghmerti.

You could spot it from the entry for Gottesmutter, “God-mother”, which is translated as ღვთისმშობელი ghvtismshobeli (literally “God’s-bearer”), but you won’t get help like that with many other irregular words. The entries and definitions are minimal and sometimes the dictionary only works one way. Ketzer, or “heretic”, is translated as მწვალებელი mts’valebeli and ერეტიკოსი eret’ik’osi, but those words don’t appear in the Georgisch-Deutsch section. And although the Georgisch-Deutsch section has წალდი ts’aldi, translated Axt or “axe”, if you look under Axt in the Deutsch-Georgisch section, all you get is ცული tsuli.

Beside that, there are no verb tables or entries for morphemes (like “un-” or “-less”), as opposed to full words, and you won’t get much help with the subtleties of verbal prefixes. But a minimal German-Georgian dictionary has advantages over a comprehensive English-Georgian one. It’s more mental exercise, more fun and doesn’t have space to transliterate the Georgian, so you get more practise in reading it.

And physical dictionaries have advantages over electronic ones. You spot things by chance in a real dictionary and you make connections you might not otherwise make. For example, if you look up the Georgian for “night”, you might get a small but interesting insight into the spirit of the language:

ღამე, Nacht f […]

ღამურა, Fledermaus f

Georgian for “night” is ghame and Georgian for “bat” is ghamura. And Fledermaus, “flittermouse”, is an insight into German, if it isn’t your mother-tongue. So is Feuerstein, “fire-stone”, for “flint”. I learned Feuerstein from a German-English dictionary, but I was using that book only because I was using this one. I’d now like to get a Russian-Georgian dictionary too. Using one would be a bit like playing chess with chopsticks, but you can learn better when you make things harder for yourself.

You don’t know it, but you’ve been reading Georgian all your life. Or at least: you won’t find it wholly unfamiliar if you try to learn it. Georgian words can look a lot like a number-plate or a random handful of tiles in Scrabble: zrda, zmna, zghwa, dzma, mtvrali, lghoba, mts’qemsi, grdznoba, chrdiloeti, aghdgoma, sadghegrdzelo, siskhlnak’luloba. An outsider needs courage to embark on an obstacle course of consonant-clusters when he wants to say (respectively) “grow”, “verb”, “sea”, “brother”, “drunk”, “thaw”, “shepherd”, “feeling”, “north”, “Easter”, “drinking-toast”, “anaemia”.

What accompanies the clusters is daunting too. The brief section on grammar mentions two “record-breaking mouthfuls”: gvprtskvnis and gvbrdghvnis (pg. 18). They mean, respectively, “he is peeling us” and “he is plucking us”. One word in Georgian can do the work of several words in English. Georgian uses prefixes and suffixes like English. But it uses infixes too. It is not an easy language to learn. But that’s part of its appeal.

Another part of its appeal is the beauty and uniqueness of its alphabet. A page of Georgian is like a work of art. A sentence can look like an incantation. If Georgian didn’t exist, I would like to be able to invent it and read authors like Clark Ashton Smith and Théophile Gautier in it. Fortunately, it does exist. But I can’t read it yet and will never be able to read it fluently until serious brain-modification arrives and languages become as easy to don as clothing.

Will Georgian become fashionable in those days? Or will human beings become wireheads and care only about pouring electricity into the pleasure-centres of their brains? We’ll have to wait and see. Pleasure is certainly important in Georgia. The language is famous for its complexity and the people are famous for their drinking. Ghwino, “wine”, is an ancient word and an ancient passion. Food is very important there too and this book describes how “each region of Georgia has its unique cuisine with its own special flavor” (pg. 183).

The Caucasus is a small but very diverse region. It’s a tough and clannish region too: Chechnya is near Georgia. This helps explain how it has preserved its linguistic and cultural uniqueness in the shadow of giants like Russia, Turkey and Iran. Georgian has borrowed vocabulary from all its linguistic neighbours – often signalled by a glottallized plosive, as in t’elesk’op’i, “telescope” – but it retains its unique identity. And the influence has gone the other way: you can’t think of Georgia without thinking of Josef Stalin: “Born and raised in Gori, a market town northwest of Tbilisi, his real name was Ioseb Jughashvili – and he learnt Russian only as an adult” (Introduction, pg. 7).

I’m not sure about that and I know for sure that another claim in the introduction is wrong. Or misleading, at least: “Russia … invaded and occupied South Ossetia in 2008” (pg. 8). In fact, Georgia invaded Russia and Russia counter-attacked. That might sound wrong – midget attacking giant? – but Georgians are not shrinking violets and their then president thought he would have the backing of the United States. Fortunately, he didn’t get it. Even after Stalin’s passing, the Caucasus continues to produce more history than it can consume locally.

And Stalin is a reminder that it isn’t just pleasure that’s important in Georgia. So is pain. Take the Georgian word ts’ameba. It means both “torment” and “martyrdom”. Languages reflect cultures and one of the interesting aspects of this book is the way that, by saying less, it invites more. It’s not meant to be a extensive dictionary or a comprehensive guide to Georgian, so you have to notice patterns and work some things out for yourself. Kartveli means “Georgian person” and Sakartveli means “Georgia”. Mepe means “king” and samepo means “royal”. Sakhli means “house” and sasakhle means “palace”. Tsotskhali means “alive” and sitsotskhle means “life”. Twali means “eye” and satwale means “glasses”. And so on.

And no book on a foreign language can learn the vocabulary for you. The mnemonic technique described by Anthony Burgess in Language Made Plain (1964) is useful. Georgian for “cold” is tsiwi. To learn it, I imagined picking up a piece of sea-weed with a film of ice on it. “Sea-weed” almost rhymes with tsiwi and that initial ts– sounds like ice cracking delicately. One Georgian word for “rabbit” is k’urdgheli. I imagined a Kurd holding a rabbit with one hand. “Kurd” is a foreign word in Georgian, which is a reminder that the initial consonant is glottallized, and the Georgian for “hand” is kheli, which is almost like –gheli.

Kheli is easy to remember, but you could reinforce it by thinking of the English word “cheirography”, meaning “palm-reading”, from the Greek kheir, “hand”. Is that related to the Georgian word? It might be. The Georgian neprit’i, meaning “jade”, is certainly from Greek. It comes from nephritis, “jade”, from nephros, “kidney”, because jade was thought to protect against kidney diseases. So that rare word is easy to remember. But mnemonics for a Georgian word are sometimes hard to think of. Try rts’qili, “flea”, or tovlch’qap’i, “sleet”, or varsk’vlavi, “star”.

I don’t have a mnemonic for mgeli, “wolf”, and didn’t need one. It’s phonetically simple by Georgian standards, but it’s still unmistakably Georgian. The word looks and sounds primal and has a primal meaning. Tkha, “goat”, and zgharbi, “hedgehog”, are good too. Names for animals don’t appear just in the dictionary but also in one of the specialized sections that close the book: words for weather, food and drink, winter sports, parts of the body and so on. Words like mk’lavi, “arm”, ghwidzli, “liver”, and ts’weri, “beard”, are satisfyingly Georgian, but mnemonically challenging. Twali, “eye”, is simpler, but that’s a little disappointing. Mnemonically, you can think of the villainous one-eyed King Twala in King Solomon’s Mines (1885).

That book contains another strange and phonetically challenging language: Zulu. But I don’t think it would be a good book to read in Georgian. It’s too straightforward and vigorous. Runes would be better for Rider Haggard. And for Robert E. Howard. I don’t think Lovecraft is a writer for Georgian either. The Armenian alphabet would better match his prose. It’s strange but not beautiful. As I suggested above, the writers ripest for Georgian are Gautier and Clark Ashton Smith. And if they’d learnt the language, they would have been worthy translators of its most famous literary work: Shota Rustaveli’s “national epic poem” The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (c. 1180-1205).

I hope I’m able to read a little of that in the original one day. This book is a good first step on the journey: an inexpensive but well-produced introduction to one of the world’s strangest, most complex and most beautiful languages. You could call Georgian an angelozebis ena, a “language of the angels” (if that’s right). If you did, you’d be reminded that Georgian words can sometimes be very simple: ena literally means “tongue”. It doesn’t challenge the outsider’s tongue. If you want words that do, look no further than this book. Look no lovelier too: Georgian may sometimes martyr the tongue, but it always blesses the eye.